Imagine a world in which all this is accomplished by clicking a single button. The latest piece of internet wizardry brings you that world. It is abbreviated, inevitably, as RSS, and it delivers a personalised, immediate online summary of all the information and entertainment you choose. It’s a 24-hour crib sheet to update you on your specific interests. See how our three guinea pigs in the Russell family, right, have tailored their various needs, from share prices to gardening to podcasting.

RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. All you need to know is that it is a way of checking the newest material on a selection of websites without having to visit them. A single RSS feed is a frequently updated list of one site’s contents, and can be supplied by corporate sites (BBC, Amazon, CNN) or the homespun (personal weblogs). Ready-made programs called “newsreaders” can display on a single web page highlights from numerous sites. These are no harder to use than e-mail programs or web browsers — discover how in the Getting Started box, right — but they are only part of the RSS revolution.

If you don’t want to grapple with new software, you can turn to a ready-formatted supplier such as Feedster (www.feedster.com), an RSS search engine that hunts information from 1m feeds. My Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com) is similar.

Soon, even these sites may not be necessary. Firefox, the latest alternative web browser to Internet Explorer, has “live bookmarks” that demystify the process, and the next generation of operating systems for Apple and Microsoft will also contain RSS features. As the bestselling tech author Chris Pirillo explains, the point about RSS is that it feels like evolution rather than revolution.

One example is the podcasting phenomenon, where people create or download personal radio shows based on RSS technology. Pirillo believes that this evolution is vital to combat “the growing problem of information management”.

Spam is killing the newsletter delivered to your e-mailbox, but RSS, says Pirillo, is unspammable. This, of course, does not mean that it is bereft of adverts — after all, anything someone has chosen to receive will be irresistible to advertisers. On the other hand, advertising is the reason that so much web content has stayed free for so long. As Adam Penenberg of Wired News points out, “the trick will be to make it as unobtrusive as possible”; if you find a feed’s adverts too obtrusive, you can always remove the feed.

Pirillo accepts that RSS might not be the holy grail, but sees it as a powerful weapon in the war against irrelevant information. He is particularly interested in how it can relieve the pressure on e-mail, which is drowning in a deluge of junk. “Now, colleagues can keep each other updated on specific projects through an RSS feed that archives every update, without all the clutter of an e-mail inbox,” he says.

This new age of convenience surfing sounds great, but there is a huge potential downside, especially with filtered news. In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte famously predicted what he dubbed The Daily Me, an electronic newspaper “printed in an edition of one” and created by software that would “read every news wire and news-paper, and catch every broadcast on the planet, then construct a personalised summary”. RSS suggests that the self-tailored Daily Me might finally be upon us, but with one huge loss: areas of interest that we might not otherwise confront. Traditional media present us with a breadth of information, as well as pot-luck insights that are a vital part of our social education.

In his book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein has argued that person- alisation leads to a narrower outlook because it merely reflects our prejudices. On the other hand, he believes that RSS newsreaders give people access to “a range of topics and even opinions”, thus ensuring that “people don’t lock themselves in echo chambers of their own devising”. This opti- mistic view assumes, for instance, that the individual who opts for the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera also requests feeds from political blogs such as Voxpolitics, Number 10’s official site, The Economist and New Scientist, as well as such aggregators of intelligent thought as Arts & Letters Daily and the blog 3quarksdaily.

In a world where many indi- vidual news outlets are becoming partisan, RSS might prove the perfect way to collect and compare opposing points of view.

NATURAL BORN TECHIE

Sophie Russell, 19, medical student

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